VOL. 8 No. 4 | December 2017

Because of the important benefits that biomedical research offers to
humans, some have argued that people have a general moral obligation to
participate in research. Although the defense of such a putative moral
duty has raised controversy, few scholars, on either side of the
debate, have attended to the social context in which research takes
place and where such an obligation will be discharged. By reflecting on
the social context in which a presumed duty to participate in research
will obtain, this article shows that decontextualized discussions of
this putative moral obligation are problematic.